I’ve decided to use a blog to explain this for a number of reasons.

 

First, it allows me to post the results of my research in such a way that others can easily correspond with me regarding it. I’m not always right, but I can always correct myself as I go along.

 

Secondly, it gives me a chance to use iWeb’s blogging software. iWeb could be seen as a competitor to a product I’ve been working on for a few years now, and I’m always interested in what my competition is up to. This isn’t bad. I have a tendency to only use software I write, so sometimes I miss a few trends because I’m in my own little world.

 

Math Commander is a descendent of The Study Buddy, which was a commercial app I sold on college campuses waaaay back in the early 90’s. I used it myself, to learn a variety of subjects in college, including Texas History, Spanish, Child Psychology, and various Chemistry classes. I sold modules for it to people in my classes. Along the way, I’ve done quite a bit of tweaking to figure out what worked and what did not.

 

For Math Commander, I stripped away everything but the essentials, and obviously removed the testing system that Study Buddy users will remember. But the lessons learned in SB still apply. Immersive experience, single button answers, and simultaneous visual and auditory feedback for correct answers are the main points.

 

One of the features I’ll probably add back in is intelligent question monitoring, so that the software watches the user for common mistakes, and augments itself based on what the user is having a problem with. This was a really useful feature of The Study Buddy--I think I referred to it as ‘Mistake testing’ there.